This week’s Twitter Mailbag does its best to unpack some of the action from this past weekend’s UFC Fight Night 26 event while also taking time to wonder what will become of Bellator welterweight champ Ben Askren.

And of course, it just wouldn’t be a week in MMA if we didn’t talk about performance-enhancing drugs, now would it?

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@benfowlkesMMA What would be the pros/cons of the UFC signing Ben Askren?

Pro the first: Ben Askren is obviously a very good fighter, maybe even one of the best at welterweight, and the UFC is in the business of having the best fight the best, right? I mean, that’s what it says, anyway. Then again, saying stuff like is easy. Just ask Bellator.

Pro the second: Say Askren comes into the UFC and it turns out that he’s not quite as unbeatable as he looked in Bellator. So much the better for the UFC, which can hold this up as proof that even the undefeated champs in Bellator aren’t as good as the regular old contenders in the UFC.

Con the first: Even if Bjorn Rebney is telling the truth when he says he won’t make Askren an offer, it probably doesn’t mean he’ll waive his matching rights and make it easy for Dana White to sign him. At least so far, these two never miss a chance to stick a thumb in the other guy’s eye.

Con the second: Say Askren comes into the UFC and does exactly what he did to all his Bellator opponents. Say he even becomes champion this way. Would that be a good thing for the UFC? Would White and Co. really want to swap Georges “King of Pay-Per-View” St-Pierre for Askren? Maybe not. But if you’re the UFC, you can’t not sign a guy just because you’re afraid he’ll win fights. You just can’t.

@benfowlkesMMA How messed is it that Vitor was suspended for PEDs after his match in Pride against Hendo and in the rematch he’ll be on TRT?

I hadn’t even thought of it that way, but now that you mention it, that does seem like a bit of poetic – well, not justice exactly, so let’s just say weirdness.

Thing is, chances are Vitor Belfort won’t be the only one on testosterone-replacement therapy for that fight. Dan Henderson is basically patient zero when it comes to TRT in MMA. He’s been on it for years, though he said he didn’t use it for his most recent fight because it became clear that the commission in Winnipeg wasn’t going to approve it (which makes you wonder about the Chael Sonnen-“Shogun” Rua bout being nixed from that fight card for “visa issues”). Presumably, that means he’ll be back on it for a fight against Belfort in Brazil, which should result in a TRTastic main event. That’s the part that seems truly, as you put it, messed.

The problem with Belfort right now is not just that he’s on TRT. Clearly, he’s not alone there. The problem is that unlike guys like Henderson and Sonnen, who have traveled around to different commissions and had their TUE applications looked at from different angles, Belfort’s been tucked away in Brazil. The UFC says it isn’t hiding him there, but you can say anything you want to. It’s what you do that matters. And lately the UFC has given Belfort nothing but home games.

@benfowlkesMMA Are you prepared for the inevitable complaining that Henderson-Pettis II didn’t live up to the first one?

Yes I am. I went ahead and prepared myself early because I figured it would be good practice for Michael Chandler vs. Eddie Alvarez II. I think that’s the right approach for these big rematches. Tell yourself there’s no way it can live up to the original. Get yourself ready for “Back to the Future II,” just so you won’t be disappointed. Then, if it turns out that you get “The Godfather II” instead, it’s Christmas in August.

Good point. It does kind of seem like the Bellator chairman and CEO is bound to take heat no matter what he does in these situations. Of course, you could argue that, at least in the Alvarez situation, the criticism was less about his decision to attempt to retain the services of his fighter and more about his total willingness to tie that fighter up in court while months and years ticked off his career, but as Randy Couture can tell you, it’s not like Rebney’s the only promoter who’s ever tried that.

I think the problem with the Askren situation is that it gives the lie to much of Bellator’s public claims. Toughest tournament in sports? Where fighters make their own destinies, free of meddling matchmakers and promoter shenanigans? Sure, unless those fighters are too good and yet too boring.

Bellator can’t have it both ways on this. You can’t be the organization that’s dedicated to pure sport over glitz and hype if you’re also going to be the promotion that doesn’t even try to keep one of its best fighters – an undefeated champion – just because he doesn’t sell tickets. You definitely can’t do that while also throwing money at aging former greats like Tito Ortiz and Quinton Jackson, regardless of their willingness to pretend to hit each other with hammers on the pro wrasslin’ show.

Want to sell tickets and pay-per-views, throwing together whatever fights you think people will pay for? Fine. But you can’t do that and also play the sporting-legitimacy card. You can’t claim that you have the best fighters if you’re letting one of your best walk.

@benfowlkesMMA Stefan Struve. We all know the inevitable. Shouldn’t they just cut to the chase? TMB

I guess it depends what you think the inevitable is. We know Stefan Struve has been sidelined for the foreseeable future with an enlarged heart and leaking aortic valve. I’m no doctor (not in this country, with all its “laws” about “qualifications” and “training”), but that sounds serious.

If you’re suggesting that the UFC should just cut him now and get it over with, I might have to diagnose you with a rare condition known as Ice Heart. It’s where a person has a cubed block of ice where his heart should be. It might not be in any of these so-called “textbooks,” but trust me, it’s a thing.

If, on the other hand, you think the inevitable is something awesome like replacing Struve’s heart with a robot heart, maybe a dolphin heart, possibly even two golden retriever hearts stitched together, then I would like to hear more. At the very least, we may have ourselves a script for one of those Syfy movies.

@benfowlkesMMA with Chael we’re tired of talking about TRT, but with Overreem it’s all we discuss. Bias by MMA media? #TMB

This is a species of argument I’ve seen a lot lately, and it rests on a flawed assumption.

You seem to think that Chael Sonnen gets a free pass on his testosterone use. That ignores the fact that, every single time he fights, you can count on the same avalanche of stories about his licensing prospects, the status of his application for a therapeutic-use exemption, as well as his opponent’s thoughts on TRT. No one’s pretending that it’s not happening. If anything, it’s happening according to such a predictable timeline that it no longer feels like news.

That’s the secret to Sonnen’s success with the TRT issue. He admits that he’s on TRT, that it’s performance-enhancing, that that’s why he uses it. He’s unapologetically exploiting a loophole in the system, then telling us to change the system if we don’t like it. And we should. That’s a point I’ve been making for years. It seems like hardly a mailbag goes by where it doesn’t come up. It’s just that it comes up so often it feels commonplace now, like a part of the MMA scenery.

That’s one of the big differences between Sonnen and Alistair Overeem, who was caught using testosterone and then blamed it on an unscrupulous doctor whom he said dosed him up without his knowledge. Overeem’s story fits a narrative that makes more sense, and offers more closure. Dude becomes a huge wrecking ball of a man, prompting steroid accusations. Dude gets caught for steroids. Dude goes off steroids and becomes not so huge, not so effective a wrecking ball. There’s a tidy little morality play there.

With Sonnen, what is there to say that we haven’t already said? What, that he shouldn’t be allowed to use TRT? That athletic commissions should get real about this, and the UFC should be leading the charge rather than trying to do as little as possible about it? That there’s going to be a lot of asterisks to go around once this sport finally learns the hard lessons that baseball eventually did? We’ve said all that, and we’ll keep saying it. It’s just that people don’t pay as much attention when they hear it for the 99th time.

@benfowlkesMMA Should Cole Miller have won by ref/doc stoppage, 5:00 R1? W/o the extra minute+ between rounds, no way Manny could continue.

It’s impossible to say whether Manny Gamburyan could have continued under different circumstances. All we know is that he did continue, and seemed more or less fine, under the circumstances he found himself in.

That said, Cole Miller does raise some pretty good points. Why did Gamburyan get that extra time? Why did his cornermen (and women) get to come over to Miller’s side of the cage while he was trying to make use of his time between rounds? Those are valid questions. Seems to me like Gamburyan benefited from the typical cage confusion that erupts when no one is quite sure what to do.

The instinctual response in those situations seems to be to get the fight started and move on, though in this case it may have done Miller a disservice. Good luck making that case to any athletic commission, though. State regulatory bodies are not known for an eagerness to admit that they were wrong.

Hey @benfowlkesMMA, they say the best defense is a good offense but is Overeem pushing that idiom to its logical extreme? Guy never blocks.

“Never” is a strong word, but I see your point. I remember watching Overeem’s bout with Brock Lesnar and thinking that the Dutchman took a surprisingly lackadaisical approach to avoiding what few punches Lesnar managed to throw. At the time, it made him look a man who was supremely confident. Then he tried the same thing against Antonio Silva and Travis Browne, and it just made him look like a man with a concussion.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie.com and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.com.